Should we sort country list?

Question

I just wrote a list of country from the Wikipedia ISO 3166-1

My goal is to use it in select inside my xhtml, but it's a huge list. How many are you from Aruba? But how many are you from United Kingdom, France, or even United States of America?

Sometimes, I can see that the most common countries are listed at the top of the list.

Is it a good practice? Why and why not?

Answer 1

This is a web application. I'm not sure if any sites do it, but you could sort the list alphabetically, and use IP Geolocation to guess a country to put as the default. It won't be right 100% of the time, but it might make filling out the form easier for the people you do get right...

Answer 2

I've seen this done where the top 3-5 countries (by volume) are duplicated at the top of the list... then a break is displayed and all countries are then listed in alphabetical order. This obviously only helps a certain set of your users but if you know that 90% of them come from within the top (3-5) countries... this might be helpful.

e.g.

<select>
  <optgroup label="Quick Picks">
    <option>Australia</option>
    <option>Canada</option>
    <option>Germany</option>
    <option>United Kingdom</option>
    <option>United States</option>
  </optgroup>
  <optgroup label="All Countries">
    <option>A....</option>
    <option>A....</option>
    <option>A....</option>
    <option>B....</option>
    <option>B....</option>
    <option>C....</option>
    <option>C....</option>
    ...
  </optgroup>
</select>

e.g. removed dead ImageShack link

Note: "by volume" I mean by volume of traffic to your particular site/application.

Answer 3

Think of your common web user... It's easier for someone (who doesn't know they can just type the first letter of their country and find it fast that way) to find his country in an alphabetically sorted list then a list sorted arbitrarily based on web population.

I recommend sticking to alphabetical sorting.

Answer 4

List them alphabetically, and duplicate your primary markets at the top.

Don't just move them to the top - I've wasted too much time looking for the United Kingdom under "U" in drop down menus for that.